Smarter Ad Spending Boosts Performance in a World Full of Fraud

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, keeping a handle on where your ad dollars are going – and to whom – is crucial. With ad fraud lurking in every corner, marketers need reliable tools to uncover hidden waste and ensure campaigns reach real people. Armed with the right insights and tools, advertisers can take charge of their campaigns to ensure they’re reaching real people and maximizing every dollar spent.

Here are four practical ways advertisers can refine their approach, reduce waste, and reach more attentive, human audiences.

Hard Savings: Reallocate Budget to Quality Placements

Ad fraud isn’t just an industry buzzword; it’s a major drain on ad budgets. Many legacy fraud detection tools report suspiciously low fraud levels, often around 1% IVT (invalid traffic) year after year. In reality, fraud is much higher. One of the first steps in tackling ad fraud is identifying where budgets are slipping through the cracks.

Independent tools that go beyond basic monitoring allow marketers to identify fraudulent sites and apps, then redirect ad budgets toward high-quality channels. This shift instantly reduces wasted spend, enabling more of the budget to flow toward real opportunities. Imagine cutting fraud-driven ad spend in half just by eliminating fraudulent placements. That’s a clear, hard saving you can directly measure.

Soft Savings: Maximize Ad Viewability

If an ad isn’t seen, it can’t drive meaningful impact. Fraudulent sites frequently display ads in non-viewable placements (like 0x0 pixels) or shady apps that load ads out of sight. Using advanced tech to assess ad placements can reveal exactly where your ads are displayed and if they’re in view, providing real data on viewability.

Some advertisers discover that up to 95% of impressions are placed in hidden spots on mobile apps. This lack of visibility is costly because it essentially results in paying for non-existent eyeballs. By identifying these viewability issues, advertisers can reduce budget wasted on ads that never had a chance, while boosting performance with high-viewability placements.

Soft Gains: Enhance Human Engagement

Ad fraud isn’t just about fighting fraudsters and bots; it’s about maximizing “humanness” in campaigns. By allocating budgets toward sources with higher human traffic, advertisers can focus on genuine engagement. This is where human interaction metrics, like measuring user engagement on landing pages, come into play. For example, impressions and traffic from human users are distinctly marked in blue in our tool, offering a clear view of real versus bot traffic.

Advertisers who prioritize human engagement often observe boosts in meaningful metrics like clicks, time on site, and even conversions – all from a genuinely human audience. When more ads reach humans, you naturally get more authentic engagement.

Hard Gains: Real Outcomes from Real Users

With optimized campaigns targeting real people in viewable placements, hard gains – like increased orders, sales, and conversions – follow naturally. Think about it: if fewer ads hit bots, and more are seen by engaged, human viewers, conversions are bound to rise. Over time, this approach results in real business outcomes, reflecting a steady improvement in engagement quality and a decrease in budget waste.

Key Takeaways for Smarter Ad Spend

Ad fraud isn’t going away, but you can outsmart it. Tools like fraud0 enables advertisers to go beyond basic IVT detection, offering a comprehensive solution that drives both hard and soft savings, increases engagement with humans, and boosts real-world outcomes. By taking control of where your ads go and who sees them, you’re setting your campaigns up for sustainable, measurable success.

Ready to see what fraud0 can bring to your campaigns? Dive into your data and experience firsthand how fraud0 elevates ad spend, cuts waste, and makes your marketing efforts count!